We recently purchased a Hörbert for our kids, which is everything you (I) want and nothing you don't - music is loaded via a SD card, there are 9 "playlists", it's mostly wood, and there's no need for WiFi or additional purchases.

The only catch is that they don't ship to the US (we just bought one in Europe and brought it back).

https://www.hoerbert.com/

My daughter wakes us up every morning smacking her tonie box (that's how you skip songs).

The figurines don't actually contain the music, they just have an NFC chip in them. The Tonie Box is connected to wifi and downloads the content.

The child doesn't really know any better though, it still gives them the physical experience without a screen.

This reminds me of the modern fisher price record players.

The old ones were traditional music boxes, and each record had the musical notes.

The new ones have the score built in to the player, and each record just provides an ID for which track to play. So you can only play music that is built in to the device.

I never had the music-box style Fisher Price record player, I had the one that was an actual phonograph.

TIL!

https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/s/1wTKcVvkCV

Ah ok, sounds like a smarter way to do it. How hackable would you say is it, eg to register your own NFC chips? It seems like a nice platform.

Pretty easy. Same as for yoto

For those looking at these, I highly recommend Yoto over Tonies.